Where is file search?

[MikZ]

The problem with locate is that the results are only as up-to-date as the last time updatedb was run, and it often produces a firehose of irrelevant results. It does weird things with permissions, too; I think sudo locate uses a different database from user locate, which may not be as up-to-date.

gnome-search-tool doesn't seem to be available out of the box in Mint 19:

Code: Select all

$ sudo apt-get install gnome-search-tool
E: Package 'gnome-search-tool' has no installation candidate

It should be, because it's fairly decent.

But I wish there was an even better solution, one that:

• stayed up-to-date, like Gnome's search tool
• had the same commandline options as GNU's classic find command (so us commandline warriors didn't have to learn yet another new set of options)
• had a nice GUI, allowing users to refine by name, timestamp, directory, type, symlinks, regex, GLOB, etc. and showing thumbnails for images, etc.

Anyone know of such a project?

[Moem]

Mod note:
Split off into a new topic, because the previous one was from 2012. Please do not revive such old topics, they are about different versions of Mint and can cause confusion; that specific forum rule is there for a reason. Thanks!

[gm10]

I disabled the mlocate index, in particular if you're using an SSD then a regular find is so fast there's just no reason for that index with all its drawbacks.

I don't know what Cinnamon's search tool looks like, but as to gnome-search-tool, feel free to install MATE's mate-utils which contains mate-search-tool, which is a fork of that.

[smurphos]

recoll is one of the best cross platform GUI search tools for searching various file formats by file content. It does rely on an indexing service and various additional packages depending on what you need to search for content off (pdf, ms office docs etc)

searchmonkey is a another good GUI tool one if you only need to search contents of plain text documents. Very similar to gnome-search-tool and mate-search-tool

gnome-search-tool has been deprecated by the Gnome devs. Gnome Shell now uses tracker which in it's current version is difficult to set up outside of Gnome Shell. Cinnamon does not have it's own desktop specific search tool other than filename search in nemo, or by adding and enabling search-providers to the menu search bar.

[AZgl1800]

Catfish is another good one